icsi friend had eg today but wont have et until sunday is that too long?

"Regular" IVF is where they put an egg in a dish with a sperm sample (many millions of sperm) and let nature do its thing.

ICSI is intracytoplasmic sperm injection where they inject a single sperm directly into the egg. It is usually done when there is severe male factor involved and is another step added to the IVF process.

The eggs won't perish by Sunday. They may not all survive, but any embryos that die during this time would have died in utero as well. The fertilized eggs are kept in an ideal environment to grow into blastocysts before they are examined/graded and either transferred back into the uterus or frozen for transfer at a later date. Looks like she will be having a 5 day blastocyst transfer as opposed to a 3 day embryo transfer.

Does she have fertility issues as well? 8 eggs is not a great retrieval rate, but nonetheless, it only takes 1.

I wish her much luck!

I first have to correct katsura3568. No one knows whether some of the embryos that die in the laboratory striving to grow to a blastocyst would have died anyway. I know lots of women who got pregnant with a 3 day transfer with embryos that did not look like they would make it. One friend of mine had a 5 and 6 cell embryo of poor quality transferred on day 3. "Healthy" embryos by day 3 should have at least 8 cells. Her twin boys will be 1 next month. It is highly doubtful that those embryos would have survived to blastocyst.

And for 8 not being a great number for retrieval, the average number of eggs retrieved is 8 to 12 eggs for each retrieval. 8 is pretty good, especially for an older women. You may hear of some women developing a large number of eggs but usually that is because they are young and have no major infertility issues.

With that said.....Some of the embryos could perish but hopefully not all. Her odds of conceiving do increase 10% with a 5 day transfer and that is why her clinic wants to wait. It is believed that the strong ones survive. That is not to say that many don't succeed with a 3 day transfer! Many do! My clinic, if you have less than 5 embryos, will do a 3dt but will wait with more than 5.

If her husband has a low sperm count, they do IVF to stimulate her ovaries to make eggs, take them out, and then inject each egg with a healthy looking sperm (ICSI). If his count, mobility, and motility was normal they would just place his sperm in the dish with each egg hoping they would each fertilize. I do not need ICSI for my IVF cycles because my husband has super swimmers :)

Just keep sending positive thoughts that those embies keep growing!!